2011 Festival Archive

2011 The Cohen New Works Festival Works

And Then Came Tango

Watch the touching true story of Roy and Silo, two male penguins that fell in love, incubated an egg, and successfully raised a baby fledgling, Tango. Poetry, dance, and music unite to tell this children’s story, celebrating modern families of all shapes and sizes.

Bike Noir

In a city of unexpected back alleys, dive bars, and taco stands, trouble arises from the discovery of a bicycle that wasn’t meant to be found. Austin’s urban landscape plays host to this noir-inspired play on two wheels. Get your bike and come follow the action.

Christmas/Music: Two Stories

Jeff Harper is a legendary rock artist, and his last album, “Black Blue Dawn,” was hailed as a masterpiece. Unfortunately for Jeff, he was so hammered that he barely remembers writing it. But when his wife threatens to leave him, Jeff sobers up, wins his family back, and releases his wildly anticipated follow-up album. And it sucks. This piece explores the intersections of drugs and creation, asking whether an artist’s ultimate responsibility is to his audience, his family, or himself.

Creative Team: Andrew Hinderaker and Daria Davis

The Chronicles of Bad Ass Women

Through a series of interweaving monologues, six desperados come together and tell their stories of heroism and humility in a staged reading with set and costumes.

Digital Craft: Handmade Craft Meets Digital Design

Exploring the possible interface between 3-D computer technology and costume technology, this installation – exhibit combines historical millinery techniques with modern methods of object construction and design to diversify the costume artisan’s toolbox. The installation presents practical and useful ways of moving between the virtual and physical world.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

In this interactive dance experience, the audience gets to choose the accompaniment for seven different choreographed solos. In a fun, and often funny, performance we will address the role of music in dance, and its ability to help, hinder, or completely alter the meaning of a work.

The Fictional Life of Historical Oddities

Beneath its boring Maple Leaf facade Canada hides a nasty secret. This site-specific adventure tells the story of the Dionne quintuplets. At just four months old, the quints were placed in the custody of the Canadian government and became the country’s most significant tourist attraction. Told through a mash-up of mediums including puppetry, projection, and sound, this performance will have you seeing the world in five ways.

Folk

Folk follows the story of Nathan, a man whose life is consumed by his research in American history. As he investigates American folklore, the stories performed onstage by an eight-person chorus. The play explores myth in American folklore and challenges our perception of whether these stories have their foundation in fact or fiction.

Footnotes for People Who Don’t Speak Spanish

This live infomercial/self-help seminar promises the audience “an authentic Latino experience.” Stepping in and out of identities ranging from Che Guevara to Carmen
Miranda, stories are told from their lives and their family histories of being “white, but not quite.” Side effects may include revelations, deportations, salsa dancing, salsa making, and dry-mouth.

Creative Team: Beliza Torres Narvaez, Rudy Ramirez, and Lily Matthews

Forced Out of (con)Text

Body memories of resistance and liberation are carried across space and time as three women of color, artists and scholars, traverse narratives of their experiences through African/Diasporic dance. Through poetry, journaling, and improvisation, they distill and re-mix the critical gestures of their experience.

Hades Ladies

A work of dance theatre, this multi-dimensional work chronicles a day in the lives of women in 1980’s corporate America. Using vehicles of dance, theatre and exploration of props such as eggs, ice cream, office supplies and power suits, the piece questions gender roles, equality, and social responsibility.

Calling all babies! This interactive theatre piece is designed specifically for children under the age of three. This visually dynamic, movement-based show explores the concept of HANDS, one of the first things young children discover. Interactive in nature, the performers invite the audience to explore the set and play with the props throughout the piece.

Headphone Stories

Explore the act of storytelling through a sound installation piece. Interview subjects were asked “If you could tell one story from your life, what would you tell?” The resulting interviews were edited into a sound composition that includes music, narration and atmospheric sounds.

Heart Trouble

How do we remember what we can’t remember? Katelyn Wood, whose father – a country radio DJ – passed away when she was young, confronts his memory and her feelings of loss by returning to the rich archive of his taped broadcasts. Heart Trouble creates a world in which what haunts our past moves into the present. Through humor, personal narrative, and country music, this solo performance explores the healing that comes from confronting lost memories and the ineffable moments in our lives.

Creative Team: Katelyn Wood, Lydia Nelson, and Nicole Gurgel

The Ideal City Project

A massive wood sculpture depicts a utopian city, which offers the promise of perfection. But is it doomed to fail? Through a serious of monologues, this performance will examine why this utopia will succeed, where others have failed, and what its downfall might be.

Jane

This inter-media piece explores social life in cyberspace through live dance and 3D animation. Jane is a human who is seduced by a virtual community of dancers and has to decide whether to leave her body behind or to shut down her cyber friends.

La Canción de la Tierra

This piece is a bilingual (Spanish-English) environmentally aware play for young audiences featuring four animatronic puppets, two human actors and a puppeteer.
Set deep in a tropical rainforest, the storyline presents the struggle to keep the Earth a clean and healthy place to live for all of its inhabitants, animals and man, by focusing on the four R’s: Recycle, Reuse, Reduce, and Responsibility.

LISTEN TO ME

An interactive audio installation, people in and around the UT Austin community share intimate stories exploring imagined fears, imagined futures, and our collective hopes. These voices are hidden around the Winship Theatre building. Slow down. Go find them. They’re waiting for you to listen.

Creative Team: Michelle Dahlenburg and Tom Horan

Never Stray

This staged reading of a work-in-progress follows the story of high school junior, and self-proclaimed theatre nerd, Leigh, as she escapes to an experimental school geared toward those who are in need of a safe place to learn and undergo therapy after experiencing traumatic bullying. She is popular for the first time and enjoys everything this new world has to offer until she meets the school’s veteran, Kira, who shows her a different side of this seemingly utopian environment.

Creative Team: Avital Stolar

Nobody Knows It But Me

Telling the story of three teenagers who come together to make a suicide pact, this staged reading challenges the concept of realism versus the subconscious through a tangled web of emotions in the minds of young people contemplating suicide.

Our Lady of Peace

Our Lady of Peace is a theatrical adaptation of a short story by ZZ Packer. The story explores themes of race, identity, poverty, and urban education. The play is devised by the ensemble and performed in a chamber theatre style, with the much of the short story’s original text serving as the script.

Racer

A week before her 18th birthday, Louise and her stepbrother Justin run away from Texas to start a new life in Nashville. But when their parents follow them, Justin’s country music dreams get sidetracked and Louise’s birthday party goes terribly, terribly wrong.

Raven’s Blanket

Incense fills the air. A shadow appears, beckoning you closer. You hear a voice telling stories of Raven, infamous Native American trickster. Join this shadow puppetry and site-specific journey following the Raven as she embarks upon an adventure to capture sun and remove the blanket of darkness. Devised by an ensemble of artists, and told through stories, images, and color, this adventure is sure to delight audiences of all ages, encouraging us all to find our own sources of light and inspiration.

Sex: A Public Education, or Lessons In NOT Looking For Love

This solo performance depicts the dilemma of being gay, young, horny, living alone in Texas, while in a long distance, open relationship with a boyfriend in Canada. Told through a sometimes sad, and often shocking collection of texts from online personal ads, chats, and social networking sites, this piece provided rare insights into the survival techniques necessary when you’re far away from the one you love and in need of a little action.

Creative Team: Stephen Low, Courtney Sale, and Rowan Doyle

The Sexy Sex Kind of Sex

What is sexy anyway? What is consent? Is consent sexy? Or not? What does it mean to consent to sex? This devised, interactive piece will explore our perceptions and assumptions around approaching sex with a partner – how does it happen, when does it happen, and how do you know you have consent?

The Sound Ascending

This chamber musical tells the story of two lovers, Miriam and Zakir, who come of age in Soviet occupied Afghanistan. Loosely based on Tennessee Williams’ play Orpheus Descending, only two characters exist in the present, Miriam and her interrogator, Mr. Donovan. Can she continue living her new life without destroying those she left behind?

Creative Team: David A. Brown and Jason Tremblay

Stockpile

Scamper into this site-specific exploration of hoarding, love, and cold-war anxiety as seen through the eyes of squirrels. Performed on the sprawling LBJ lawn, Stockpile finds one squirrel scurry pitted against a newly formed other. As they fight over litter, lost nuts, and half-eaten muffins, will peace prevail? Will we get caught up in the battle?

Swimming Upstream

Join the interactive performance about a gay sperm on a journey through the female body. This experience incorporates live actors, puppetry, multimedia, and music, and transforms the audience members into sperm and eggs involved in the ultimate game of chance.

Synaisthe

Synaisthe is an inter-media, movement-based work, exploring the ways in which our sensory experiences are linked and associated through the physical pathways of our bodies. The performance will utilize a variety of visual technologies, primarily infrared motion tracking software, to control and manipulate virtual images in real performance time.

The Transition of Doodle Pequeño

Oranges the size of pumpkins, vampires, devil horns, tutus and learning to speak “goat”- it’s Halloween and Doodle is the new kid in the quadraplex. When his first friend shows up in a tutu and Doodle dons a skirt, bullies take notice. The play for young audiences, presented as a staged reading, takes a look at gender identity, difference and discovering things aren’t always what they seem.

Transitional Spaces III

This site-specific contemporary dance places abstract movement in the entranceway to the power station spanning 24th St. to the Lab Theatre, a space ordinarily occupied by pedestrian traffic. The dance is comprised of movement ranging from minute gestures to grand physical maneuvers. The ten dancers separated by the elongated space will invite the audience to open their field of vision and experience the space differently.

When the Horse Runs Off

This chamber opera is based on the Buddhist fable of a boy’s wish to see the world outside his small village. By leaving all he knows to be true, he sets in motion a chain of events that leads to the unexpected, in ways both good and bad. It is small in scale, but by using just a handful of musicians and singers, playing multiple roles, it will create a surprising opera experience.

Creative Team: Randy Maguire and Sarah Saltwick

You Can’t Win

Presented as concert reading, this new musical tells of Jack Black, the first career criminal to ever publish his autobiography in the United States. The story begins in post-Civil War Kansas City, Missouri and ends in San Francisco, California in the 1920s. Jack Black is the real deal. His story is a one of a kind classic, a poetic journey into history and sociological study of America’s criminal class.